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janeenlambert
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« Reply #3 on: November 10, 2008, 09:53:50 AM » |
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The son of George Willis Pack was Charles Lathrop Pack. He is probably known to some of you as the author of Thomas Hatch of Barnstable which has a section on the Pack family, including our ancestors George and John. The book includes a biography of Charles Lathrop Pack (pages 193-197) which was written by Dr. Arthur Adams, Professor of English, Trinity College, Connecticut. I have edited it for inclusion here.
Charles Lathrop Pack was born at Lexington, Michigan, 7 May 1857. He was educated in Cleveland, Ohio, and went abroad to study forestry in the Black Forest of Germany. Upon his return, he spent several years in explorations in Canada, northwest Louisiana, and Mississippi, and was among the first to discover that the yellow pine forests of the South were comparatively immune from injury by forest fires.
Interested in forest and water conservation for many years, Mr. Pack was among the first to assume leadership in the conservation of America’s natural resources. When the first Governors’ Conference took place at the White House in May 1907, President Theodore Roosevelt invited him to attend as a conservation expert. Later, the President made him one of the national conservation commissioners.
His understanding of conservation problems inspired him to originate and to organize the National War Garden Commission before the United States entered World War I, and he thus contributed enormously to the success of the Allies. His purpose was to stimulate the planting of a million home gardens in 1917. The commission’s figures, based on a nationwide survey, indicated that the products of these gardens were worth $525,000,000.
In 1911 he became a director of the American Forestry Association and served as its president from 1916 until 1922. In 1919 he sent a commission to Europe to ascertain what damage war had done to forests of Great Britain, France, Belgium, and Italy, and devised a plan for contributing American tree seed for replanting the devastated forest areas of these countries. These seeds being successfully grown and more being needed, he in 1921 and later years gave hundreds of millions of American tree seeds to these countries.
In 1922 he organized the American Tree Association with headquarters in Washington, D.C., to support a constructive policy of forest protection and forest tree planting, to increase appreciation of forests as natural resources essential to the sound economic future of the country, and to further public education in forestry. He also made gifts of large demonstration forests to Yale University and the University of Washington and established chairs of forestry at the University of Michigan, Cornell University, and Yale University. In 1930 he created the Charles Lathrop Pack Forestry Foundation to carry on research in forestry and the Charles Lathrop Pack Forest Education Board to award forestry fellowships.
Among his writings are The War Garden Victorious (1919); Memorial Trees (1921); Roads of Remembrance (1921); Trees as Good Citizens (1922); The Forestry Almanac (1927); and Forests and Mankind (1929).
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